or generations of Irish children, America was the proverbial land of milk and honey. How could it be any other way? When an exiled aunt or uncle returned to visit from Boston or New York every few years, they came laden with presents and dripping money from their expensive clothes. In between those eagerly-awaited trips, they dispatched regular envelopes of cash to their siblings struggling to keep the ship of state afloat back home. From Dingle to Donegal, impressionable kids duly grew up with the idea that across the ocean lay an impossibly glamorous country where everybody must be rich and successful.

This is exactly how my nine-year-old boy views Ireland. How could he see it any other way? To him, Irish people are incredibly well-off and synonymous with epic feats of shopping and spending. They are the ones we drop off at the sprawling Long Island shopping mall full of brand-name outlets at nine in the morning, and return to collect some time around six. They then fill the car from floor to roof with bags upon bags of shoes, runners and designer clothes, and cackle with glee at the bargains they've picked up. "Is everybody in Ireland this rich," he asked me one day, "or is it just the ones who visit us?"

That an American child can view Ireland the way Irish kids used to regard America neatly captures how distorted the relationship between the two countries became over the past decade. A nation still not quite over the idea of us arriving here in the holds of coffin ships had to come to terms rather quickly with legions of Celtic tigers flying in for the weekend to stock up on Calvin Kleins while sashaying proudly down Fifth Avenue. Between that, and the thousands of emigrants selling up and swapping enclaves in Queens and the Bronx for bungalows in Sligo and Mayo, New Yorkers weren't quite sure how they were supposed to regard Ireland anymore.

They thought they knew the place as a small, impoverished island whose people were periodically forced to leave in search of work and better lives. Suddenly, they had to come to terms with Irish property tycoons swooping in to buy Manhattan penthouses for millions of dollars. When I first moved here in the summer of 2000, the image of Ireland was still so archaic it was very common for somebody to hear the accent and pose a tiresome question about the violence in Northern Ireland. "You guys aren't fightin' over there any more right?" Within a year or two, those inquiries had given way to the even more irritating: "How'd you guys all get so rich?"

The change in economic circumstance had unforeseen cultural impacts too. When they went back to visit, Americans didn't exactly enjoy the new Ireland. The roads were far better but the atmosphere, they will tell you ad nauseam, had changed. Many who had returned looking for that old John Hinde postcard of the cattle clogging up the boreen under the title 'Irish Traffic Jam' found themselves experiencing far too many very real traffic jams all over the country. Beyond the discomfort of cars running out of road, there were a lot of other complaints too. The place had become too businesslike and way less friendly. Ireland of the brisk, efficient and not very wholehearted welcomes, if you like.

The latter moans were less egregious swipes at the perceived warmth and generosity of old Ireland and more jabs at the new multi-culturalism. Having waited all their lives to visit, some Americans weren't too happy to discover that the average tourist could go for days without interacting with actual Irish people. Call it racism or label it prejudice but the fact is these people, who'd always dreamt of visiting the land of their ancestors, hadn't banked on hearing far more Lithuanian than Limerick accents once they touched down in Shannon.

Not everybody was unimpressed by the newly-developed Ireland. After one trip, an American friend of mine told the story of asking an official in Connolly Station for the time of a train and seeing him use a hand-held device to access the information. My pal was astounded. He left thinking Dublin had turned into some sort of gizmo-crazed European version of Tokyo, but without the efficient public transport.

Another American of my acquaintance came back expressing disbelief at how all the Irish teenagers dressed exactly like their high school counterparts over here. He was equally astounded at the number of American shows broadcast on television in Ireland, although at least that helped him understand why so many of the local girls sounded uncannily like valley girls.

This rather skewed view of each other works both ways. Do you know how many times during the boom years I had to listen to Irish people lament the direction of the country by telling me, "We're gone very American" or "We're so American now, it's all work, work, work"? Beyond film and television clichés, I don't know what America these people have ever truly experienced but it's not the one I know.

Where I live, the average commute to work is less than half an hour each way and the idea of driving two hours from some pocket of rural Ireland to Dublin in order to earn a buck would be beyond their comprehension. And if everybody was truly becoming more American, parents wouldn't be dropping their kids off in the car parks of GAA clubs and using trainers as baby-sitters either. They'd be getting out and helping with the running of the teams. That's the American way.

Of course, if Americans start becoming obsessed with the prices of their own homes, outsourcing the rearing of their kids to au pairs, and splurging money they can't afford on holiday apartments in obscure pockets of eastern Europe, I look forward to telling them they are getting "very Irish".

In case it sounds like I'm bitter because I left Dublin in the summer of 2000, smack bang in the middle of the glory years, I'm not. Even at this remove, I can recall how wonderful it was, that July all those years ago, to land in a place where people rarely, if ever, discussed how much their houses were worth.

The economic transformation didn't change everything about Ireland. The country retained its traditionally exaggerated view of its own importance in American and world affairs. Whether it's a byproduct of the outsized contribution of Irishmen at various points in this nation's history and/or the tiresome braggadocio of Irish-American politicos through the decades, it's always there and it's kind of funny to witness it up close. Over the past decade, this trait manifested itself several times.

There was the St Patrick's Day when Bertie Ahern was arriving in Washington and the headlines in the Irish papers were all of the same type: 'Taoiseach to warn president about Iraq'. The image was startling. Ahern was going to stroll into the Oval Office, clip Bush around the ear and tell him to cop on to himself regarding Saddam Hussein. Once I'd stop picturing Bush turning around and asking: "Who is this guy and where is the island he comes from?", I looked forward to how this summit would play out in the American media. But it didn't – not in any major newspaper, and not on any of the umpteen cable news channels that broadcast everything that ever happens anywhere, just to fill the time.

If that was only one instance of the way Ireland presumed it mattered far more than it actually did, there were so many more. Every time the issue of the illegal Irish came up, there was a sense that Washington would be somehow cajoled into treating the 50,000 Paddies and Patricias differently to the tens of millions of illegal Hispanics. Aside altogether from the hypocrisy and sheer cheek of a nation expecting this kind of charity while busy deporting Nigerians itself, this all begged one serious question. Why did they think the Irish should be judged by different rules to everybody else? Because they are Irish? Because only the Irish have provided the hands that built America? Please.

Anybody who has spent any serious amount of time in the United States will realise quickly that, beyond the delusions of our own inflated national ego, Americans – from the corridors of power to the diners on main street – regard Ireland as a tiny yet charming, insignificant island on the fringes of western Europe. During the build-up to Bertie Ahern's address to the joint houses of congress in Washington last year, nobody in the Irish media seemed to get that memo. This event was hyped and exaggerated as if America was going to stop work for half an hour to tune in to the great man delivering words of wisdom.

When the day finally came, C-Span (the network dedicated to showing all congressional proceedings – no matter how dull – live) was the only channel that carried the speech. And that even came with a rather embarrassing line running across the bottom that read: 'Resigned his office under allegations of corruption'. To have his finest hour besmirched in this way was only fitting because Ahern was involved in the most ludicrous episode in Irish-American relations in the whole decade of the noughties.

He was the man in charge when, unlike America, Ireland awarded itself a day off/day of mourning on the Friday after the 11 September attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. The intention may have been honourable and I know Irish citizens died in horrific circumstances that morning. But it was the exact opposite of what America had asked people to do. In the hours and days after the towers fell, leaders from Rudy Giuliani to George W Bush exhorted people to show the terrorists they hadn't won, by continuing business as usual. Go to work. Go to school. Get out and shop.

Obviously more upset by the terrorism than the nation still coming to terms with the gaping hole rent in its most famous city, Ireland took a break, a little breather to take in the enormity of the horror. Whenever that day comes up in conversation with Americans, and very often it does, I tell them the story of Ireland downing tools, and even though it's 9/11 we're talking about, they laugh uproariously. I'm not sure whether they are laughing at the sense of entitlement, the implied self-importance or the cringe factor. When it comes to Ireland's perceived relationship with America, all three fit nicely.